Promotional Information

Focusing on Malian veterans of twentieth-century French wars, argues that France's and Africa's shared military history continues to animate their political relationship, especially regarding debates about African immigration to France

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Soldier Families and Slavery’s Echoes 29
2. Ex-Soldiers as Unruly Clients, 1914–40 63
3. Veterans and the Political Wars of 1940–60 108
4. A Military Culture on the Move: Tirailleurs Senegalais in France, Africa, and Asia 146
5. Blood Debt, Immigrants, and Arguments 183
Conclusion 210
Appendix: Interviews 217
Abbreviations 221
Notes 225
References 295
Index 321

About the Author

Gregory Mann is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

Reviews

"Gregory Mann, in this thoughtfully argued and deeply researched book, shows how West Africans who served the French empire in their military careers and in both world wars developed a language of mutual obligation in relation to the state with which the French government had to engage. Following this history of claim-making to the present day, Mann forces us to rethink how we understand such concepts as state, nation, colony, empire, citizenship, welfare, and immigration."--Frederick Cooper, author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History "Native Sons is an eloquent book about social relationships that spanned centuries and continents, relations between former household slaves and their former masters, between conscripts and commanders, between demobilized veterans and well-off civilian villagers, between veterans and states. These relationships--articulated in idioms of patronage and obligations, rights and republicanism--should make us wary of attaching a 'post' to every colony, empire, and nation we talk about."--Luise White, author of The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe "In his lucid new study of Malian veterans of the French colonial army, Gregory Mann raises provocative new themes for writing conjoined local, colonial, and postcolonial histories. He has elegantly captured the dense web of human relations, discourses of obligation, and reconfigured social ties that link the dusty town of San (Mali) to the many other outposts of the republican imperial state as well as the postcolonial capitals of Paris and Bamako."--Alice Conklin, author of A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930